If I tell the audience what they should think, then I am robbing them of their own imagination and their own capacity of deciding what's important to them.

Classicism becomes avant-garde when everyone else is doing their utmost to develop new stylistic forms. I think it's healthy to return to classical forms.

I give the spectator the possibility of participating. The audience completes the film by thinking about it; those who watch must not be just consumers ingesting spoon-fed images.

Film is simply the most complex way you can express yourself

I'm not really a happy person. It's a question of temperament. I have a tendency toward melancholy. You can feel quite happily melancholic.

An artist is someone who should raise questions rather than give answers. I have no message.

I don't need a psychiatrist. I can sort out my fears with my work. That's the privilege of all artists, to be able to sort out their unhappiness and their neuroses in order to create something.

I try to get closer to reality, to get close to the contradictions. The cinema world can be a real world rather than a dream world.

Drama lives on conflict. If you're trying to deal with social issues seriously, there's no way of avoiding violence, which is so present in society.

Film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth, or at the service of the attempt to find the truth.

At its best, film should be like a ski jump. It should give the viewer the option of taking flight, while the act of jumping is left up to him.

I am a worried person with a stressed out soul, living a simple life with no capital.

I'm not about to go out and buy a snake for a pet. I mean, I may have faced a few fears but I'm not insane.

I'm not much of a joke writer.

A man of worth never gets up to unsay what he said yesterday.

The American way is the way most law-abiding Americans live - in debt. Does this make a balanced budget un-American?

It's not about being a Baptist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, or 5-Point Calvinist. God has only one family and, as Christians, we're in it!

So-called designer bags are useless, and most are also ugly, faddish and overpriced. Pared down and sleek is always best.

Wars will remain while human nature remains. I believe in my soul in cooperation, in arbitration; but the soldier's occupation we cannot say is gone until human nature is gone.

Economic theology is the opiate of the middle classes.